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[LorefightActivated]: SHE IS AN ASSASSIN?!
[InLove]: Is my wife's combat power actually that broken?
[Territorial]: Who said "your wife"? She's MY wife. Clarify your pronouns.
[Chaos]: Okay, okay. Everyone's wives. Happy now?
[TianWenjingHaters]: TIAN WENJING. Get out of this chat.
[Cackling]: The enemy's face when Max read off Shuten's stats. That's the face of a man seeing his tax returns for the first time.
[Geography_Check]: Wait, I didn't know there were Heroic Spirits this strong from Japan. But is she even a hero? This feels more like a natural disaster category.
[Dragon_Country_Pride]: Strong my ass. That's a regional buff, plain and simple. She tries stepping foot in OUR country, Lü Bu would send her flying. One hit.
[HornsDiscussion]: Actually, come to think of it—doesn't Shuten-dōji have a Riding skill too?
[ConfusedByQuestion]: Where are you getting that from?
[VerySubtleInnuendo]: Don't you see the two horns on her head? Perfect riding handlebars.
[Clarity]: What are you talking about? I don't understand.
[OldPervert]: If you don't understand, go home! Some of us need to take off RIGHT NOW.
Still horny. Chronically, terminally horny. The chat had been this way since before Max had started streaming and would presumably continue long after the servers shut down.
And honestly, in this case, the behavior was at least understandable.
Because Shuten-dōji was currently in her first ascension form.
Which meant the purple robe was doing the absolute minimum amount of work a garment could do and still technically qualify as clothing. Beyond the essential coverings and a few decorative pieces of lightweight armor, there wasn't much else to speak of. The robe spread open at the chest. The material was thin. The whole aesthetic said "I am dressed like this on purpose and I find your discomfort with it deeply amusing."
Female fans in the chat had a different but equally strong reaction: absolute vixen. She was the enemy of every woman who'd ever had to watch a man completely forget how to function the moment something attractive walked into a room.
But reactions aside—they'd met. Which meant fighting.
Shuten-dōji stepped lightly off her Master's head, landed in the middle of the street with small, precise steps, and arranged herself into a stance that somehow managed to be simultaneously relaxed and battle-ready. Several older perverts in the chat mourned that their food was a bit dirty. A smaller contingent pointed out that this made it better.
Her eyes found Max's.
"Ying, ying, ying~" The pout was theatrical and perfect. "Master, that was genuinely too much. You told everyone everything about me. Do you know how I'll face people after this? Maybe..." The smile widened slowly, "you should just die here. That way we're even."
Nothing about her expression changed. The smile stayed. The voice stayed warm. The killing intent that saturated the air around her was real enough to have physical weight.
This was how she operated—warmth and death occupying exactly the same space, indistinguishable from the outside.
On the other side of the rubble, Derek had come back to himself.
His name was Derek Walsh. He was thirty-four years old. His usual days consisted of delivery food, online gaming, and the particular niche of MMO parasocial behavior where you called female players "mommy" and then immediately minimized the window when they asked you to stop. He'd found Holy Grail War two days ago through a recommendation algorithm, declared it incredibly good with one minor flaw (no intimacy options), and had since been in a complicated emotional relationship with his own Servant that mostly involved her grabbing him by the throat when he got too close.
The current situation had his heart rate doing things that weren't healthy.
Because one hand, Max was standing twenty feet away and looked like he could deadlift a car. On the other hand, Medea was in the air above the scene, magic circles already deployed, and had previously reduced half a city block to geometric debris without raising her voice.
Derek's instincts were screaming.
But his eyes were on Medea.
Medea, who even in full battle mode, even radiating the aura of a woman who had seen civilizations fall and found them wanting, even holding a weapon—
—kind of had wife vibes.
He was aware this was insane. He continued thinking it anyway.
Sensing the gaze, Medea's face arranged itself into an expression of precisely targeted disgust that could have been classified as a mild magical attack.
Then Max tore off his trench coat.
Everyone stopped.
Because what followed was not a battle pose. It was not a dramatic superhero landing. It was not any of the conventional escalation signals that announced combat was imminent.
Max began doing warm-up jumps.
Small, rhythmic, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet with a loose-limbed ease that looked less like preparation for a fight and more like he was waiting for a bus that was slightly late.
Anyone from a certain generation, in a certain media landscape, would have recognized it immediately. The specific cadence. The specific energy. The sound that followed—shwoosh of displaced air, the particular percussion of movement in an open space.
The chat detonated.
[OHNO]: THAT'S—
[ItCantBe]: NO WAY
[ShockAndAwe]: IS HE DOING GOKU'S WARMUP?
[Confirmed]: THE STANCE IS THE GOKU WARMUP I REPEAT THIS IS THE GOKU WARMUP
[DatabaseError]: My brain has crashed.
And then he moved.
One second he was there, bouncing lightly in the warm-up stance.
The next second he wasn't.
There was an afterimage—the vague ghost of where he'd been, heat shimmer and displaced air—and then Max was already crossing the distance to Shuten-dōji, already mid-swing, and the punch connected with her face before most people had registered he'd moved.
Shuten-dōji staggered.
It was the first time in the encounter she'd shown anything other than perfect composed amusement, and even now it wasn't pain or fear—it was surprise. Pure, genuine, unperformed surprise. Like a cat that had been petted with more enthusiasm than expected.
Her body started to fall.
Max was already moving for the follow-through.
The Shoryuken—and there was no other word for the uppercut that came next, it was textbook, it was canonical—caught her on the jaw on the way down, clean and crisp and with enough force behind it that her feet left the ground entirely.
A hundred and forty-five centimeters of top-tier divine Servant, launched skyward.
[Crying]: THREE PUNCHES HIT MY WIFE IN THE FACE
[Devastated]: MAX. OLD THIEF. THAT'S HER FACE. THERE WERE OTHER OPTIONS.
[Horrified_But_Impressed]: Holy crap those hits looked SATISFYING though. I feel bad for saying that.
[UnrulyAudience]: It felt even better than watching Artoria get hit. And I love Artoria.
[Wailing]: Where else should he have aimed?! You guys—
[SpicyChatComment]: The happy beans—
[Moderator]: This chat has been warned.
Max didn't give the chat time to spiral further. He pulled up the stat sheet.
"Here's the breakdown," he said, all business, tracking Shuten-dōji's arc with peripheral attention while addressing the camera. "My base stats are nowhere near her level. No illusions about that. But—" he highlighted the item column, "—Medea's equipment changes the math. The Bracelet of Steel Strength. The Swift Deerskin Boots. Lucky Charm, Magic Charm, Hardened Armor Charm. Each one hits around D-rank Noble Phantasm equivalence. The Lucky Charm alone pulls my Luck stat from E to B+."
[Running_Calculations]: D-rank Noble Phantasm. Each. EACH one.
[Revised_Tier_List]: Medea is the most broken support character in this game and I need everyone to understand that.
[Newbie]: Wait, so she turned her Master into a Servant?
[Veteran_Translator]: She literally performed Hero Creation on a living human. Yes. That is what happened.
[HolyGrailFomo]: I need to start a new save file with Medea. Right now. Tonight.
[OriginalQuote]: "Other Servants can summon armies. Medea made her Master an army." What a time to be alive.
Shuten-dōji landed. Rolled. Came up in a crouch with her robe settling around her and that foxlike face rearranging itself back into amusement as easily as breathing.
She was reconsidering, Max could tell. The surprise had been real, but the recalculation was instant.
Without waiting, he pushed the advantage. He crossed the distance to Derek in three strides—
And Derek ran.
This was Pavlovian. No thought required. Max moving toward him at that speed with that look on his face activated every self-preservation instinct Derek possessed, and those instincts collectively voted run by a margin of one hundred percent.
He bolted.
Which put Max in pursuit and Shuten-dōji in a difficult position.
She appeared between them in an instant—silk and oni horns and the casual lethality of something that predated most human concepts of danger—and caught Max's arm.
Her grip felt like a vice wrapped in velvet.
"Ara~ ara~ Master." The tone was reproachful, playful, warm. "We were having such a nice conversation, and you hit me that hard. I'm so sad. How about you apologize with your death~?"
"Get your hands off my Master." Medea's voice came from above, flat and cold.
"Oh~" Shuten-dōji didn't look up. "Is the little witch upset? You really shouldn't be so tense, darling. Stress ages you. And if you age too quickly, well—no one will want you." A pause, perfectly timed. "Isn't that what humans call... menopause?"
"AH AH AH AH—"
[WinnerDeclared]: Shuten-dōji has won the trash talk and the battle hasn't even ended.
[Screaming]: MEDEA DOESN'T DESERVE THIS
[ActuallyLaughing]: Ten Medeas couldn't out-talk one Shuten, I am so sorry.
[ModerationActive]: [NOTICE: User 'Asclepius' has been muted for 24 hours for aggressive content.]
[Chaos_Witness]: Is that user a walking example of the problem or—
[MaxFanclub]: MAVERICK WHERE ARE YOU?! Get Shuten's Master! Stop spectating and HELP YOUR FAVORITE DEVELOPER.
Medea, vibrating with rage, unleashed the magic arrays she'd been holding.
Guided arcane beams—dozens of them, small and fast, tracking heat signatures and magical auras—streaked down from above like a meteor shower on a personal delivery schedule.
Shuten-dōji moved.
Every dodge was fluid, unhurried, each footstep precisely placed to put her exactly where she needed to be when the beams arrived. She was talking the entire time—some running commentary on Medea's posture, her haircare routine, her prospects for the upcoming decade—while her body moved through the barrage with the ease of water finding its way around stones.
Medea was not taking this well.
Max used the distraction.
He wrenched toward Derek, who was still running—sprinting for the far end of what remained of the commercial district with the conviction of a man who had committed fully to the "run away" strategy.
He almost reached him.
The numbness started in his ankles.
It moved fast—up through the calves, the knees, a spreading cold sensation that had no business being in his legs—and then the stinging hit, sharp and total, radiating upward from his feet to the base of his skull like electricity through wet wire.
Max stopped mid-stride.
He looked down.
He looked back at Shuten-dōji.
She smiled at him with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment and had found the wait entirely worthwhile.
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